Thus spake Marcus G. Daniels circa 10/06/2008 04:33 PM: > glen e. p. ropella wrote: >> This abstraction >> away from the fully embedded _human_ to idealistic "skill sets" is the >> problem. It's what leads us to hire "experts" and then remove them from >> their proper context and place them in positions where they do >> unimaginable and unforeseen harm (or good). > > If there are no meaningful way to talk about skill-sets then there isn't > any meaningful way to talk about proper context. Proper context is > just a refinement of a skill-set, perhaps down to even 1 or 0 > individuals. (The cookie and the cookie cutter.) If that number is 0, > then might as well start with the next closest apparent person (the one > with the ill-defined `skill set').
I disagree. Viewing proper context in terms of skill sets is merely one way of cutting it up. One can also view proper context in terms of "stands to gain or lose the most". I.e. in terms of consequences. And I prefer to cut it up that way. I want the decision to be made by the person who will pay for a failure or benefit from a success. This is an accountability based embedding as opposed to a capability based embedding. Of course, when I use the word "embedding", I _intend_ to imply both accountability and capability. Ideally, the person who makes the decision is _both_ the most capable and the closest to the consequences. But it's not an ideal world. So, when compromise is necessary, I would compromise on capability. (I may be ignorant of how my motorcycle works, but when _I_ try to fix it, at least it's _my_ bike that I break!) Besides, it's better to focus on getting it right than it is to focus on being right. Nobody can _ever_ be perfectly capable. But it's common for someone to bear all (or seemingly all) the consequences of a decision. No. I reject the whole skills based decision making. It's that abstraction that is killing us. People spending other people's money. People investing other people's money. People designing military equipment that other people depend on for their lives. Ugh. > Yes, I would rather live in a world of unforeseen consequences driven by > (universal) scientific curiosity than one driven only by local needs. > Out on the farms, the lowest common denominator can get mighty low. [grin] Well, _personally_ I agree. But we're not talking about anarchists and borderline anarco-capitalists. We're talking about the government for and by "normal" people who revere safety and convenience (which they misname "freedom"). And in that context, they prefer predictability and a minimum of unforeseen consequences... even to the point that they like and want fascism. > I can certainly see that conservative governmental aggregation policies > could lead to a more *stable* world, but I can't say that I am > particularly interested in optimizing for that. Also I said `real', as > in a sufficiently good model of the world such that, say, an iPod plays > music, or the DirectTV puts pictures on the screen, or the JDAM kills > the terrorist. Other kinds of model of control systems that are less > interesting to me are those that concern advancing stable social > configurations, esp. the ones that make claims about `good' and `bad' -- > they seem to usually have the opposite outcome and destabilize. Yeah, again I agree, personally. But that's not what this thread is about, not really. The thread is about how to build -- or constructive criticisms of -- a government to gracefully handle things like corruption, greed, and stupidity, which are permanent (and beautiful and necessary, by the way) properties of humans. And, in that sense, my claim is that the primary problem is the way government accumulates (aggregates) up from the purely local to the non-local. In short, because we _don't_ design government to accumulate nicely, and instead we patch in silo'ed band-aides at each level with no regard to other levels, that we have the critical weaknesses we have. Hence, if I'm right, then no amount of single level patchwork (e.g. limiting campaign contributions or creating crisp party categorizations of the population, etc.) will cure the disease. It will only treat the symptoms. -- glen e. p. ropella, 971-219-3846, http://tempusdictum.com ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
